When Santiago Cruz arrived in the U.S. in 1992, at the age of 19, he was a pretty typical immigrant. He’s from Honduras, in Central America, where opportunity was in short supply. His sister already lived in the Roanoke area, which made it logical for him to come here. He spoke no English. The need for work led him to food service, and he wound up at Sake House, a Japanese restaurant in Salem, where he was eventually offered the opportunity to learn to make sushi.

Aptitude helped him become an expert sushi chef. Ambition led him to open Wasabi’s, a popular sushi restaurant on the City Market. Wasabi’s has been a lunch and dinner anchor on the market for years. Cruz now employs other immigrants from Honduras, China and Cambodia, as well as Americans. He has three full-time and seven part-time employees.

“I’m lucky that my father taught us to work hard,” says Cruz of himself and his seven siblings. “This was my dream. To achieve something.” He saved money for 13 years to open his own restaurant.

Anne Sampson

Santiago Cruz

“It was scary,” he continues. “The restaurant business is very risky. I was afraid to make a mistake and lose everything.”

Among the negative ideas current in the popular mind regarding immigrants to the U.S., both legal and unauthorized, is that they represent a drain on a community’s resources. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a tax-exempt special interest organization which advocates strict, low caps on immigration, published a study in 2017 which estimated that each illegal immigrant cost the state of Virginia $4,893 in services annually.

That same year, the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis (CIFA) released a report touting immigrants to Virginia as “pillars of our prosperity,” citing age, education, job skills, tax contributions and entrepreneurship as factors.

Immigrants in Virginia tend to be of prime working age, between 25 and 44, have higher educational attainment than the national average and are shifting from blue-collar to white-collar jobs. They also tend to be naturalized U.S. citizens, living here at least five years, often more than 10 years. Many have passed a citizenship test and they pay taxes.

Like Cruz, they often open businesses. According to CIFA, nearly 11 percent of immigrant workers in Virginia were self-employed, compared to 7 percent of U.S.-born workers. The number of immigrants who own incorporated businesses has increased 20 percent since 2007. Many of those are “Main Street” businesses – the grocery stores, restaurants and gas stations we all frequently visit. While immigrants make up about 12 percent of the population in Virginia, they own 34 percent of the Main Street businesses, serving as catalysts to attract further commerce.

“Immigrants are more likely to start their own businesses, and more likely to succeed,” says Beth Lutjen, executive director of Roanoke’s star diversity organization, Local Colors. “They just work hard, pool their money, hire family members and pull together as a group.”

Lutjen paints a picture that reflects American small business of an earlier age, when Mom and Pop owned a grocery store and lived in a little apartment in the back, a model that is still often found in other countries.

“If you give an immigrant a house, they’ll fix up the main floor, put their business there, and live in the basement,” Lutjen says. “An American would spend money on the main floor and live there, and put their business in the basement. Their definition of what you ‘have to have’ to live is different.”

Overall, Virginia’s population is aging. An aging population means a shrinking tax base, and a shrinking tax base means tighter budgets and fewer services, as well as fewer people to do the work.